Polar plunge

It’s tradition here at Palmer Station that when the boat leaves to give a proper goodbye, you jump in the water after it. Well, since all the other kids were doing it I figured I should as well. After watching the boat pull away, we all stripped down to our bathing suits and jumped from the pier into the freezing Southern Ocean. Really you just go numb, so the water doesn’t feel cold but man, that run to the hot tub was a little chilly going barefoot through the snow…

Everyone in the hot tube post-jump

It turns out that I get my own room here, I moved into the Bio building which is a bit older than the other main building. But it’s nice to have my own space and of course be super close to the Galley! The bottom of the Bio building is also where all the labs are. The other main building, GWR, has the gym, bar, dorm rooms, and a nice lounge.

Bio Building

We were finally able to have our Boating II course this past Friday. It was my first time driving a zodiac so I was really excited. We practiced landing on islands, which is pretty difficult because you have to hold the boat steady pushing the nose onshore while swells come in – it’s a mixture of a little gas and steering the boat in the right direction. Our boating coordinator bravely put on an immersion suit and flung himself into the water several times so that we could practice “man overboard” drills and retrieve him. Most notably as we were about to head into the station he flung himself out as I was driving…but I successfully steered a rescue without running him over. Now that we’ve had the class though, Kim and I can head out and start sampling!

Let me take a little time to explain the type of research I’m doing. The basic idea of Kim’s research is to use an echo sounder to locate and document krill, and plot their location/volume is comparison to tides. We will be going out during diurnal tides (one high and low tide in one day)to collect most of our data, to see if these tides effect where the krill are located and thus have an effect on the foraging behavior of penguins. This means once the diurnal tides come in we’ll go out everyday for almost 2 weeks! We plan to be out each day for 8 hours, so let the work begin…

The actual echo-sounder is a round black object, which connects to a computer via cable. We attach this black object to a piece of board to floats at the surface as we conduct our research. Appropriately the board has dorsal fins, and was in need of a new paint job this year. I took charge with sanding it down, applying primer, and then finally being able to decorate it. The idea is that it is a leopard seal (a ferocious predator down here in the Antarctic) with a fake dorsal fin attached to disguise itself as something less threatening. Science humor? 

Echo-sounder

My work in progress

Completed with spots

and teeth (echo-sounder attached on bottom)!

Well, it takes a long time to get there...

After 9 days of traveling, I finally made it to Palmer Station, Antarctica! I flew from Dulles International Airport down to Santiago, Chile and landed in Punta Arenas, Chile to await my voyage by sea, aboard the Laurence M. Gould research vessel. I am working on a zooplankton acoustics project with a Post-Doctoral student Kim Bernard from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. I will be living at Palmer Station until I return home at the end of December.

Punta Arenas, Chile
My group arrived in Punta Arenas after 2 days of flying, and we were all escorted to the Jose Noguiera hotel where we would stay until we boarded the ship. We went out to a local restaurant, where Alpaca was on the menu – but I went with a local fish instead. I did some exploring in the city, where I learned you are supposed to rub the toes of a statue in the main square for safe passage across the Drake. An observation of mine is that Punta Arenas is a city ruled by dogs. They are everywhere, roaming around in packs, sitting at street corners and occasionally escorting you as you walk through their turf.

Rubbing the toes. 

On the Ship
Well one thing I learned from the ship journey is how to stay on a treadmill while going over some of the roughest seas in the world. A normal day would consist of waking up for breakfast (or not) and then playing games or watching movies with others on the boat. It’s a pretty numb time, but there are good sights if you go outside and opportunities for photos.

While going through the Drake Passage, all of us helped deploy XBT probes which tested water temperature and/or conductivity. A group of scientists is studying the ocean currents in the passage, and hope to release these probes for the next 50 years to obtain data. Some of the ship crew joke that by the end of the project, there will be stepping stones across the Drake where the probes were dropped. Basically the procedure is to shoot the probe out and you let it transmit data for a few minutes and then cut the line, it’s repeated every 30-45 minutes. Here I am in the process – I really was excited to be helping, I must have that face on because I had left my hat inside (note it’s around -13 degrees C with the wind chill).

Our fifth day at sea, we stopped at the Island of Copa to unload people and supplies to the field camp there. I was a ‘sherpa’ which meant I helped load stuff off the zodiacs (large inflatable boats) and onto land. It was a lot of work, but nice to actually be doing something after a few days at sea. We got to be close to some of the penguins, who were all congregated next to the field camp. I nearly did a split between the ship ladder and the zodiac on our way back, but I hung on for dear life and made it up. I think it would have been a bad end to the day to fall in that water. Brrr. Too bad when the boat leaves on Sunday I'll be jumping in voluntarily for the local tradition. 

Penguins!

So far at the station I've hiked up the glacier in our backyard and will soon be learning how to drive and operate Zodiac boats.